Criticism v. Correction

In the March 2016 print edition of First Things, RR Reno explains the limits of “critical thinking,” often offered as “an intellectual cure-all for what limits our desire to know.”

Reno acknowledges that “The critical strategy for renewing the intellectual life can seem exactly the right way to tear away the falsifying veil we fabricate to protect ourselves from reality. The disenchanting work of critical analysis drives a wedge between our minds and convenient falsehoods.” That disenchantment, that shattering of idols, is often a necessary step toward truth.

But it is not sufficient: “Once the work of deconstruction is done, there’s little left to motivate us to move toward something better. The intellectual life is based on the desire to know. Critical thinking may clear away falsehoods. It may disabuse us of our convenient parochialisms. But it does not satisfy our intellectual affections. In fact, if given undue priority, critical thinking can cause those affections to wither. We become experts in debunking, but at the risk of becoming intellectual spinsters unable or unwilling to allow ourselves to be enflamed by the possibilities of larger truths—truths to be affirmed, not critiqued, in a consummation of our desire to know.”

Drawing on Plato and the Bible, Reno argues that the intellectual life must be motivated by love. The intellectual life is a matter of both head and heart. Love “forces us to face our existential poverty,” and thus drives us outside ourselves. Criticism collapses into egotism, but “love is the great enemy of the ego.”

Reno has much more to say along these lines, and it is wise and inspiring. But I want to push a bit on one point. If love is the driving force of intellectual life, then it must also be the driving force of what we call “critique” or “criticism.” It is not simply that we add love to intellectual criticism; love must infuse the whole process from the beginning.

And this, I think, is why the Bible never speaks of “critique” or “criticism” but rather of “rebuke” or “correction.” Criticism claims to take an objective outsider’s stance; correction has interest at stake. Critique challenges ideas; correction challenges people. Criticism tries to change thoughts; correction aims at repentance. Philosophers may offer critique; driven by love for God and for a people enslaved by idols, prophets offer reproof.

Once we make that shift, all of the biblical instruction and examples of correction become relevant to the Christian intellectual. There is a pastoral dimension to intellectual life. When a Christian scholar assesses another’s work, he should remember Paul’s exhortation to Timothy to correct gently (2 Timothy 2:25). “Correction” can be severe, an expression of zeal for the glory of God, like Paul’s rebuke of Peter in Galatians 2. For Paul, the differences between himself and Peter was not an academic one. But the goal was not to belittle Peter or to exalt Paul; Paul was zealous because the honor of Jesus was at stake.

Severe or gentle, a Christian scholar must always remember that in dealing with texts, ideas, theories he or she is ultimately dealing with people made in the image and likeness of God, and he must frame his response to that truth.